"I'm not sure what he draws them with, I guess it's one of those markers or something," said the Museum of Modern Art press minder of Romanian cartoonist Dan Perjovschi's "What Happened to US?" the first exhibit at the still relatively new MoMA to really take advantage of the four-story atrium in the center of architect Yoshio Tanaguchi's Puritan design.

All those tall, blank, white walls, punctuated in a seemingly random fashion with rectangular windows ("art holes"?), are empty no more.

Perjovschi has filled them with, well, curated graffiti.

The title of "What Happened to US?" is, as befits graffiti, a pun, meaning both you and me and the United States. Like the late Saul Steinberg, his fellow Romanian cartoonist, Perjovschi has been doing his little stick-figure cartoons for newspapers and magazines for years, and has only begun to mount museum shows recently. He takes account of his surroundings with little art jokes -- like drawing a crude square on the wall labeled "Museum," with a tiny folded back corner marked "Project Room," or another square labeled "Art" suspended from a nail by a chain, which are themselves labeled "Institution."

But most of what Perjovschi has to say is vaguely political, or even sharply anti-war, like two drawings of a crowd, one cheering as a tank knocks over a statue, and the second cheering as the tank itself explodes.

The question of his title reflects the disappointment among many at America's turn toward militarism in the wake of 9/11, our use of torture, setting up of secret prisons, elevation of our alliance with Israel and rejection of the European Union's approach to the developing world. If there's an iconic reference to how Perjovschi sees America right now, it's probably the drawing of a man standing on tiptoes to pull down the stripes on an American flag -- like a set of Venetian blinds -- in order to peer suspiciously out at the world.

It's quite tempting to refer to Perjovschi's work as "little drawings," because they really do look like doodles in the margins, even when they stretch over 12 feet tall. His arrangement on the two walls of the atrium he has decorated has a similar provisional quality, as if the doodles have spread in from the edges to fill up the barn-door-sized page rather willy-nilly. Each drawing remains discrete, pushing its own little punch line, like the bent figure who tries to pull up the Statue of Liberty's dress to look underneath.

If there is a common theme it is the default drive of drawing itself: The doodler is everyman, a pipsqueak, yet one whose insight can prick the most overinflated balloon of ego in the real world. Eastern Europeans, even as they have been courted by the Bush administration as the "New" Europe, have always been alive, as Steinberg certainly was, to the opposition between the individual and society -- that's what their aversion to Communism turned out to be in the end, a weary rejection of government bullroar.

"What Happened to US?" can be read as a caution against easy assumptions about where Central Europeans really are on the spectrum of our new world order. One of Perjovschi's cartoons shows two figures, one with hammer and sickle stuck in his back and the other with a credit card in his, saying, "We have a lot in common."

It's the unlikely correspondences across the world that a cartoonist sees; the little details that bluster tries to cover up. Like the two parallel lines marked "BERLIN WALL" that diverge to become, on one side, "Israel/Palestina" and on the other "US/Mexic."